We could really do with another computer in the office. It doesn't need to be fancy. It just needs to do email, word processing and the books. It does need to be extremely reliable.

We are losing a lot of good admin juice, wasting time, hoping to get on a computer. It would be good for productivity and admin happiness to get this sorted quickly. If there aren't any solutions for cobbling something together quickly, I would propose we spend a bit of money and get set up.

i have a pc, dell, it's fine but just not needed, i don't know much about it ( was my sons) but i can bring it in.theres nothing wrong with it so emails etc should be absolutely no hassle, but it has no monitor at the moment.

Installed Ubuntu on the dell from Mirja today, it's setup in the office. Thanks Mirja!

Unfortunately I couldn't get the acer working yet. I wiped windows from it but then the ubuntu installer kept crashing, so now it has nothing on it. I backed up the files that were on it first, even though everyone seems to think they're unimportant. I'll come in some time and try again to install Ubuntu on it, but I don't think it's urgent as the office has two computers now and there isn't a third keyboard, mouse or screen anyway.

I also got Shannon and Catalina to make dropbox accounts and set them up on the office computers. So they've now got their files such as the EVS files backed up, shared between the two of them, synced and available on both office computers and their own laptops or from any computer via the dropbox website. Very useful.

Other people who have important forest computer files -- Chris, Martin, and I don't know who else -- you need to get on top of the dropbox, make yourself an account, set it up on the office computers, share your files with others on dropbox. I can walk you through this, will take about 15 mins.

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I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

If you want another go at installing Ubuntu, then that is OK. My parents got one of these Acer bad boys (on my recommendation, after I got this one for the office), and they had trouble when they put Ubuntu on it. It was freezing a while after booting - there would be a nasty hard disk noise, and then they would be stuck. Does that sound like your experience?

I had the same sort of trouble with my Samsung N130 netbook, but then a kernel upgrade came out, and it had a patch to work around this non-ACPI crap which would put the disk into power saving mode.

I half wanted to get my parents' box for the challenge, but they managed to get it returned. My plan was to try a newer kernel (was it 10.4 you were installing?) and if that failed, take out the hard disk, use a USB stick for the OS disk and have an external hard disk for extra storage.

There seems to be a problem with the new computer, aka chewbacka. It doesn't crash just when attempting to switch user, it does it randomly as well. I've worked on it all day yesterday and it crashed about 3 times while I was working on a document or writing an email.

It is great to have it so even if there is nothing to be done to fix it, then just be aware of that and constantly save your work while on it!

eh my familial 'systems manager'...however, he intimates it's not a problem with the hardware, but "you use ubuntu, you got to live with it..." ...just meaning, i translate, that we did not experience any crashings so the problem's likely solvable.

I was running memtest on this computer overnight, but when I came in today to see the results it was turned off. Did someone turn it off? I'm trying the test overnight again tonight.

I'll try to run more hardware tests on it over the next few days, if I find the problem maybe the part can be replaced. If I don't find anything then we'll keep using it and see whether or not the crash still happens. I've replaced the monitor, that might fix it if the problem was a broken monitor. I've also updated the software, so if it was a software problem that might have fixed it.

The problem Catalina described (now and then the screen just suddenly goes blank for no apparent reason) sounds likely to be a hardware thing to me.

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I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!